Door-to-Door Maniac

Back in the spring, TCM ran a spotlight about singers in the movies. Country singer Marty Stuart sat down with Alicia Malone one night to talk about, among other things, his friend Johnny Cash, since one of the movies was part of an attempt to turn Cash into an actor: Five Minutes to Live. The movie was originally titled Door-to-Door Maniac, and that was the title in the program guide, but the print TCM showed had the re-release title Five Minutes to Live.

The movie opens up with Vic Tayback, playing con artist Fred Dorella. Fred is talking in a darkened room as though the events in the rest of the movie have already happened. He discusses how he met up with Johnny Cabot (Johnny Cash), and how this led to everything going wrong. Flash back to a robbery gone wrong on the east coast that ended in a running gunfight. Fred has a plan to rob a bank out in California where nobody knows who he is, but he's going to need a second, which is how he's introduced to Johnny.

After Johnny shows his sadistic side by shooting his girlfriend to death, the action moves to California. Fred is about to show Johnny exactly what his part in the bank robbery is going to entail. Nancy Wilson (Cay Forester, who also wrote the screenplay) is a typical suburban housewife with a husband Ken (Donald Woods) who is a vice-president at the local bank branch, with a son Bobby (Ron Howard at the age where he was still called Ronny). Mom is up for a big role in the local women's club, but Mom and Dad are the sort of couple who keep getting into arguments. We learn later that Dad has been having an affair and was planning on telling his wife about and that he was going to leave her.

Fred and Johnny have been casing the joint because the robbery doesn't quite involve the traditional guns the way that you'd see in a lot of other movies. Instead, Fred is going to use Ken's position at the bank to cash a check for a mid-five-figure sum, which was quite a substantial amount of money back in the early 1960s and which definitely needed a vice-president's signing off on it. As for Johnny, his job in the robbery is to hold Nancy hostage in her own home until Fred gets the cash and can get in touch with Johnny to tell him the robbery is a success.

Now, as you can imagine, there are some complications. One is the aforementioned affair, which might give Ken the motivation to let Johnny kill Nancy. The kid, however, is the bigger complication. Johnny may be a ruthless killer, but he doesn't want to kill children or have anything to do with them if he can avoid it, so he's not happy on finding out about little Bobby. Still, after Bobby goes off to school, Johnny tries to pass himself off as a door-to-door salesman of... guitar lessons?! OK, there are a few issues with the plot. But Nancy lets him in and he naturally pulls a gun on her. And then things don't quite go to plan over at the bank....

Five Minutes to Live is an ultra-low-budget movie with a lot of lesser-known actors, or at least in Cash's case someone known for singing and not acting. The acting here isn't the best, and as I already said there are a few plot holes. But the movie is decidedly entertaining despite its lack of quality. I don't mean that it's bad so much as there's a reason why it's not so well known even though it's got Johnny Cash in the cast. Its quirkiness, however, makes it definitely worth watching at least once.